Mug
This mandrill mug suits you if you take your first coffee without wanting to talk to anyone. It carries Ndong's portrait: blue-and-red mask, orange beard, and an orange hat pulled down to his eyebrows, over a plain teal background.
Foto: Y S (@santonii) / Unsplash (Unsplash License)Mandrillus sphinx
Show me the light, and I'll stop.
Tropical lowland rainforest across west-central Africa: southern Cameroon, mainland Equatorial Guinea, Gabon — home by far to the largest population — and the southwest of the Republic of the Congo. It favors primary forest and dense ginger thickets, and also turns up in forest-savanna mosaics like those of Lopé.
In his story, behind the cab seat Ndong always keeps a liter thermos he has no intention of sharing with anyone. Next to it, on the same toolbox, he leaves two cups — not one — in case the train chief happens to come aboard halfway through the run and fancies a coffee at that hour. He's never needed to use both cups at once. Doesn't matter: they stay there, set out, waiting for a visit that almost never comes.
In his story, the best part of Ndong's shift comes around two in the morning, when the carriage goes completely quiet: nobody standing, nobody talking, just the noise of the rails. The mandrill barely has a tail: a stump of seven to ten centimeters that linked it to baboons for years, until genetics placed it closer to mangabeys. This mug, like the rest of the collection, is made to order: each piece ships only when someone requests it, never before.
